The development of large networked of distributed has had a major impact (indeed it has also been influenced by) the requirements of multimedia systems.
There is clearly a huge need in the requirements for performance and application.
Many of the issues that concern distributed computing research is complimentary to multimedia systems, For Examples:
Multimedia systems are concerned with real-time delivery and scheduling which is a challenge for any distributed systems.
Many Multimedia applications would not be possible without a distribute systems architecture, for example:
The architecture and technology aspects are discussed in the next chapter. For the rest of this chapter we focus on broader system design issues.